Equal Pay—The European Dimension

When the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 it accorded Community law supremacy within the national legal system, a fact which has impacted profoundly on the matter of equal pay (at least at the level of theory) as it has on many other matters. At the point at which the UK (with the Republic of Ireland) joined the European Community, only one piece of Community legislation governed equal pay — Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome, which came into force in the then Member States in 1957. This chapter demonstrates that neither Article 119 nor the Equal Pay Directive, nor for that...

When the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 it accorded Community law supremacy within the national legal system, a fact which has impacted profoundly on the matter of equal pay (at least at the level of theory) as it has on many other matters. At the point at which the UK (with the Republic of Ireland) joined the European Community, only one piece of Community legislation governed equal pay — Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome, which came into force in the then Member States in 1957. This chapter demonstrates that neither Article 119 nor the Equal Pay Directive, nor for that matter any other EC Directive either then or now in existence, prohibited race discrimination in pay.